Dr. McClure has been recognized for his efforts to define the field of precision engineering, his leadership in the creation of the ASPE and his technical contributions in the area of thermal effects on manufacturing accuracy. Ray has been a passionate spokesman for precision engineering and his technical and organizational skills have had a profound impact on the field and those involved in it.

Ray was born on December 31, 1933, in North Dakota. He moved around because he was an Air Force brat. He finished high school in Spokane, Washington, in 1951 and entered Washington State College with the intent of getting an Air Force commission via the ROTC. After failing the eye exam, he had to lower his sights to only a BSME degree in 1955. Ray was employed at Boeing in Flight Test until he received a fellowship to Ohio State University in 1957. While at OSU, Columbus, he worked at North American Aviation (now Rockwell/Boeing) and Battelle Institute.

Before graduating with a MSME, he was appointed to the faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Oregon State University. While an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University, took a summer job at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and received a NSF grant that allowed him to pursue a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, finishing in 1969. . His doctoral dissertation was entitled "Manufacturing Accuracy Through Control of Thermal Effects." Over 500 copies of this thesis has been distributed worldwide and has served as a reference for several standards pertaining to machine tool performance testing and metrology environments, especially the ASME B89.6.2. Before graduation from UCB, he joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at LLNL in the Metrology Group, headed by Jim Bryan. Over the next twenty-five years, he had several positions within LLNL, including Deputy Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department, Division Leader of the Energy Systems Division and Program Leader of the Precision Engineering Program. He retired from LLNL in 1988 and joined the Moore Special Tool Company as Vice President for Engineering and Technical Director. He retired from Moore in 1996.

Measurement, testing and design have always been key elements of his work. While a consultant to the Bureau of Mines in 1963, he developed a fringe counting laser interferometer dilatometer to make the first measurements of thermal expansion of Columbium (now Niobium) at 1500 degrees Celsius. The actual "fringe counting" was done by a graduate student, who counted the wiggles of a line on a strip chart recording. The original light source for this instrument was an "ozone" lamp from a clothes dryer. This was replaced with a prototype HeNe 130 mm laser from Spectra Physics, which at that time had only three employees working in a rented garage.

He met his wife, Amelia, at Boeing and was married in 1956. Amelia passed away after a fight with cancer on September 1, 2001. They have two sons, Michael and Steven.